deathmtn

But the fact that so many polls are reporting the exact same margins and results raises a troubling possibility: that some pollsters are making adjustments in such similar ways that those choices are causing the results to bunch together, creating a potential illusion of certainty — or that some pollsters are even looking to others’ results to guide their own (i.e., “herding”).

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One possibility is that pollsters may sometimes adjust a poll result that looks “weird” to them by choosing a weighting scheme that produces results closer to the results of other polls. There seem to be strong incentives for risk-averse pollsters to do so. Unless a pollster is conducting a lot of polls and they can be sure that the impact of randomness averages out, they may fear reputational and financial costs for getting a result wrong due to randomness, since pollsters are graded on their polling accuracy.

In states with abortion bans, such patients are sometimes bounced between hospitals like “hot potatoes,” with health care providers reluctant to participate in treatment that could attract a prosecutor, doctors told ProPublica. In some cases, medical teams are wasting precious time debating legalities and creating documentation, preparing for the possibility that they’ll need to explain their actions to a jury and judge.

Dr. Jodi Abbott, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University School of Medicine, said patients are left wondering: “Am I being sent home because I really am OK? Or am I being sent home because they’re afraid that the solution to what’s going on with my pregnancy would be ending the pregnancy, and they’re not allowed to do that?”

The datacenter industry is set to emit 2.5 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide between now and the end of the decade, three times more than if generative AI had not been developed.

The research, "Global Data Centers: Sizing & Solving for CO2," shared privately, estimates the total global emissions for datacenters across Scope 1, 2 & 3 between now and the end of the decade, and concludes that construction of new facilities combined with their electricity needs will hit 2.5 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent, or about 40 percent of the entire current annual emissions from the United States.

But the prices they deliver are influenced by other opaque methodologies. In recent weeks on Polymarket, for example, a mysterious trader named Fredi9999 — along with a few other, possibly linked accounts — has taken an enormously outsized pro-Trump position, essentially dictating the former president’s price. By way of explanation, Fredi9999 has insisted that he has “no political preference” and simply sees Trump as a big favourite. But internet sleuths and academic experts have suggested ulterior motives. Perhaps these traders have inside information, or are trying to affect public perception about the candidates. As with polling, it is always tricky to measure a thing without changing that thing.

Sayre’s law: the fighting is so bitter because the stakes are so low. No matter how much we pore over the polls and the results, we will never know exactly why Harris or Trump won the 2024 election, and no probabilistic forecast is ever strictly “wrong”. FiveThirtyEight infamously gave Trump only a 29 per cent chance in 2016 — but 29 per cent chances happen all the time. And each polls-based model is driven by assumptions and opaque methods all its own, with just a single night every four years to check them against.

Consider an extreme hypothetical, not too ridiculous given the present scarcity of undecided voters, where the real world and the electoral world are entirely unlinked: precisely half the country only ever votes for one party and half only ever for the other. The only variance in polls, then, comes from statistical noise or sampling error; real-world events are electorally meaningless; and elections are decided by a hair’s breadth, determined by turnout and weather patterns in the Milwaukee suburbs, say. Telling empirical or predictive stories here is like inventing pictures in the static on a broken television screen.